The same words keep coming up when political experts and activists of various ideological stripes look back at the 2018 election and talk about its broad themes — what divided the nation, motivated voters, and led to Democrats’ gains:

In the month since the election, as late-ballot counts showed that Democrats expanded their dominance of California government and captured a controlling majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, we’ve been asking many of the same observers — and others — how it played out, what message voters sent, what changed and what didn’t.

“Nothing much changed in terms of (the electorate’s) partisan and ideological leanings. But the intensity of the Trump opposition allowed the Democrats to achieve much larger gains than a lot of people anticipated,” said Dan Schnur, a USC professor and former Republican spokesman and strategist, expressing a common take on last month’s results.

Schnur had said before the election that the outcomes of many races would hinge on voters’ attitudes toward President Trump, and said this week that he was right (adding, “that’s a relief”).

But Schnur included himself among those who didn’t anticipate that Democrats would pick up as many House seats as they did, winning in 40 districts previously represented by Republicans, far more than the net gain of 23 they needed to gain a majority.

Democrats’ gains were their biggest in any midterm election since 1974, when they picked up 48 seats with Republican Gerald Ford in the White House. Over the past half century, the average pickup for an opposing party in the first midterm for a new president has been 27 seats.

Still, other Republicans tried to downplay Democrats’ wins by calling them predictable — even their clean sweep of targeted seats in California, where seven House seats flipped from red to blue, five of those in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“It was fairly predictable, in California especially,” said Peter Sovich, chairman of Long Beach Republicans. “California is so anti-Trump that anyone with an R (for Republican) next to their name was already facing an uphill battle. And then they were outspent, too, with all the (campaign) money coming in from (wealthy donors) Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.”

Despite the data suggesting otherwise, David Hadley, vice chairman of the California Republican Party and a former Assemblyman from L.A.’s South Bay, said the November election results were “surprisingly typical” for the first midterm of a new presidential administration. But he also termed it an atypical “wipeout of pretty historical proportions” within California.

Hadley attributed Democrats’ capturing the House — while Republicans strengthening their hold on the U.S. Senate — to voters’ preference for divided government following a period of Republican control, Democrats’ more effective use of newly legal methods of getting their supporters to vote, and what he views as news-media biases that pose obstacles to GOP candidates delivering their messages.

Hadley chided people who hyped the election as the last chance to head off attacks on democracy by an authoritarian-minded president.

“The 2018 elections should be an intellectual embarrassment to the people who were claiming that fascism was ascending and democracy was descending in the United States,” Hadley said,

Progressive activist Noah Edelson, a network creative director who lives in Sherman Oaks, had said before the election that he feared Republican victories would allow Trump to chip away at democracy. Told about Hadley’s argument that the 2018 midterms showed democracy is alive and well, Edelson agreed only to a point.

“On its face, (the election was) normal. But when we have someone in the White House who does not believe in compromise, who idealizes dictators, we have a problem,” Edelson said.

Edelson said the Democrats’ House victory brings “equilibrium” to government.

A pro-Trump activist and leader of Make California Great Again, Jo Reitkopp, tried to cast doubt on the election results.

“To be fair to both sides, I personally do not have evidence of voter fraud,” Reitkopp said, before questioning the process that saw Democrats surge to victory thanks to mail-in and provisional ballots counted in the days after Nov. 6.

“But I think the consensus among conservatives and people who have supported our candidates is that we don’t believe these were legitimate results.”

But with results all but official, political scientists in Southern California who have been studying voting data said the election was distinguished by high turnout, highly partisan voting patterns, and the effects of Democrat-friendly demographic shifts and district-line shifts in key areas of the country. More than usual, specifics about candidates and issues mattered less to voters than did the candidate’s party registration.

“Partisan dominated to a spectacular extent. Once a district was ready to flip (from Republican to Democratic), the candidate characteristics didn’t seem to matter all that much,” said Marcia Godwin, professor of public administration at the University of La Verne, who said congressional election results could generally be predicted by whether districts leaned toward Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Godwin noted that a “wide variety” of Democratic candidates won, ranging from Orange County’s Harley Rouda, who “more or less ran as a Reagan Republican that the Republican Party had left behind,” to Los Angeles County’s Katie Hill and Orange County’s Katie Porter, who “ran on progressive platforms.”

Veteran Democratic campaign consultant Bill Carrick pointed out that none of the seven Democratic candidates who flipped Republican congressional seats have held public office before, and only one had previously run for office.

Although specific issues may have mattered less than in other elections, Carrick said, it appeared one issue that was a factor in races across the country was health care. Democrats were helped, he said, by voters’ increasing support for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

And although voters seemed to vote more for the party than the person, the election also produced increases in the number of women and black members of Congress.

Christen Hebrard, president of Black Los Angeles Young Democrats, had hoped before the election that she would see victories by African Americans Stacey Abrams for George governor, Andrew Gillum for Florida governor and Ben Jealous for Maryland governor. All were defeated. But reading between lines in the result tables, Hebrard saw “extraordinary success” in the fact that Abrams and Gillum came closer to winning than any other Democrats in their states since the 1990s.

“It showed you can run black candidates statewide,” Hebrard said. “This midterm election was notice being delivered to Democratic leaders and funders: It has to include all of us.”

Interviews with political insiders and politics watchers demonstrated that it was easier to agree on what the election was “about” before the election than it is now. Going in, the midterm looked like a gut-level choice between competing visions of America. Coming out, it’s all that — and more.

One thing should be clear to everybody, Schnur said: This remains “an extraordinarily divided country.”

Kevin Modesti is a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Southern California News Group, covering the political scene in Los Angeles County. An L.A. native, he was a sports writer, columnist and editor for most of his career, and later an editorial board member, writer and editor in the Opinion section. He lives in the San Fernando Valley and is based in the Woodland Hills office.